Grouchybeast

Good point. Maybe just simply limit damage procs to one per power?

Cap proc damage at a percentage of the base damage of the power.

It's funny, because I used to play on Defiant, and now every time I go to Atlas Park on Reunion I'm less 'why is it so empty?' and more, 'OMG, where did all these people come from???'

If you feel that SS is that much better than Fly, why not just take SS?

It might be worth noting that back on live there was a drop bug that specifically and consistently only affected some characters. Because people are always claiming that the drop rate is broken, and because they hadn't done anything to change the drop rate, the devs didn't take it seriously. It took a whole bunch of players doing statistical analysis on drops in logs to prove it was happening. So it's possible that the same bug has recurred, or that another bug is having the same effect.

I really enjoyed Dual Pistols on live and had a couple of characters, but I never found a pair I really liked with it for either Defender or Blaster. I just rolled a Dual Pistols/Martial Combat blaster and OH MY GOD. It is AWESOME. I have no idea how the damage is relative to other sets and I don't care because it's SO MUCH FUN to Ki Push a mob, Storm Kick them while they're still in mid air and then finish them off with Dual Wield. I'm honestly disappointed when mobs die before I get to finish the sequence. I haven't even got to Hail of Bullets and Eagles Claw yet.

Regen and recovery bonuses also tend to come early in the set. Often they're the 2 piece bonus. It's very easy to stack up multiples of them, and so they're weaker bonuses than the later set bonuses.

I had the same issue when I first came back to the game (back in October). I couldn't get the load file option to work with a pathname at all. I did eventually manage to get around it by renaming and moving files so that the one I wanted to load became the default one, and that seemed to work fine.

The info is put up on Discord pretty quickly, in my experience.

Well, yeah. Fly, Fireball, and...no, I guess that's covered everything that really matters.

I agree. And, assuming the drop rates are the same as live, there's a mismatch between drop rate and crafting in the common:uncommon ratio. Crafting Uncommon recipes usually uses 2:1 common:uncommon, but the drop rate is 5:1. Any increase in demand over supply will be felt in uncommons long before commons.

If you look in the beta server patch notes section, the patch called [Staging] is the one that will next go onto the live servers.

Have you tried switching back again? I've had issues with badges that didn't award until after an alignment change.

I think the revamp of Sister Psyche into Penny Yin was a great model for future TF revamps. Keep the same main enemy group and AV, radically cut down the number of missions and remove repetitive hunts and time-fillers (SP was 14 missions, PY is 4). Synapse already has some good maps available with the clockwork factory dressing, and has the GM zone spawn which is a nice touch, so just by cutting out 2/3 of the 15(!!!) missions it would become a much more enjoyable experience. I mean, this is what Synapse looks like right now: 1 - Kill all. 2 - Street sweep. 3 - Talkie. 4 - Kill all. 5 - Kill all. 6 - Kill all. 7 - Patrol 8 - Kill all. 9 - Patrol 10 - Defeat boss. 11 - Talkie. 12 - Hostages. 13 - Defeat boss. Babbage! 14 - Talkie. 15 - Defeat AV. You could make a good start on a revamp by just taking out missions 3-11 and stitching what's left together in the middle. (To be fair, I'm pretty easy about TF plots. This past week I've been duoing TFs, and it's made me realise this is literally the first time that I've actually known what the heck any of the TFs stories were. When you're playing them you don't get the mission info, and if I'm running a TF I don't like to keep everyone hanging around while I read everything.)

Reanimated States can go stand in Kallisti Wharf, under the big memorial statue that they built for him because he was dead. He can give guided tours of the plaza, and people can take photos and whisper about how much smaller he looks in real life.

Hmm. I guess it depends on how the game keeps track of it in the background. I just checked with a level 13 character, and being defeated didn't count towards the 'paid off debt' badge, so it looks like at the moment the debt cancels out the patrol XP but doesn't register as debt for the badge. That doesn't mean the game couldn't use it as a test to award the badge, though, since the debt must still be calculated.

Perhaps it depends on the server? On Reunion, the vast majority of the help requests go in the Help channel, and the vast majority of group requests go in LFG. I have seen help requests get swamped in general chat sometimes, even though people are very determined to help (sometimes to the point where I wonder if the enthusiastic avalanche of information ever scares people away :-). But based on how people already use the existing channels, I think a Group chat will be used and be useful.

Exactly. It would work like the 'X Times the Victor' badge someone mentioned above. New character created, zero debt: awarded the Never Dead badge. Character has at least 1 point of debt: Never Dead badge changes into the Has Died badge. The badge count always stays the same, only the name changes. And if there happen to be any DIY hardcore characters already out there, they would automatically be awarded the Never Dead badge when it went live, because they would have 0 debt.

I wonder if it would be possible to create the badge so that it's awarded on character creation as the Never Died badge, and then changes name on the first death to the Not So Not Dead Now, Huh? badge. (I am not good at naming badges.) Then the hardcore characters would have something nice and shiny to mark them out rather than simply the absence of a badge.

I thought about badges for not dying, but adding a whole tranche of badges that it would be impossible to get retroactively would be sure to bring out the angry badgers (of which I am one :-).

There's a door to First Ward from Underground Imperial, or at least there used to be on live. Back then I had a Praetorian character I was very slowly levelling up to 50 on goldside only.

Merits were never meant to be an equally efficient way of buying IOs, though. Merits were implemented as a way of controlling market prices by introducing supply when prices of a small number of IOs became stupidly high. They also serve as a deliberately inefficient way of buying recipes for the players who yelled and screamed up and down on the old forums that they didn't want to be forced to touch the filthy market to get their shinies. They make buying IOs without the market possible, without creating a ton of extra supply of very rare IOs. The ability to use converters to turn merits into inf is already an incredible step up in ease, convenience and efficiency from live. It can be explained very, very simply to anyone in game or in the forums. The last thing the game needs is to open up another source of inf generation to encourage inflation.

An extremely simple and easy to implement Hardcore Mode to help people run Hardcore SGs/challenges etc: add a badge awarded the first time a character dies. Mechanically, award it for the first point of debt earned. Then it will be easy to see if a character has never died. Once a hardcore character earns that badge, then of course it's up to the player if they do the right thing and delete.

I feel like the results of that would be fairly predictable, though, which is instead of running AE Fire Farms/PI papers/Tinpex, people will run New Most Efficient AE Farm/New Most Efficient Repeatable Normal Content/New Most Efficient Incarnate Trial, and we'll be back exactly where we are, only with higher rewards across the board. What does work pretty well right now, actually, are the weekly SF targets. I wonder if something could be done along those lines to encourage people to run a wider variety of content?

Actually, a lot of people enthusiastically agree that there should be more challenging optional and/or high level content. The consolidated difficulty thread poll suggests that view is in the majority on the forums. The only contentious part is whether there should be a global change to difficulty (most people seem to feel not) and secondarily whether there are enough players who would actually use such content to make it worthwhile developing. And one reason people question that is because the difficulty conversation cycle generally goes like this: A: The game is too easy, we need a hard mode or harder content. B: Okay, but meanwhile there are already lots of ways players can choose to challenge themselves. Have you considered [SO only/Ouro with buffed enemies/AE challenge missions/etc]? A: No, I can't find enough people who want to play like this to make up even one static team.